Problem with cooking by recipes

#1

I’m a pretty much newbie when it comes to cooking
When I try to cook by certain recipes, Sometimes I don’t have enough pounds of meat
Or the dish turns out too spicy for me
How do you like adjust recipe and stil make it taste pretty awesome?, Or you don’t do that at all?
I ■■■■■■ up so many times, the dishes are so bland…
(Sorry if my english is bad)

#2

Generally I either add more meat the next time if there wasn’t enough meat the first time, or less spice the next time if there was too much spice the first time. In other words, try, learn, adjust, enjoy.

#3

I have experience so I know what should be nice for me… But if it’s something new and I have no idea, I use a tiny fragment of everything so it won’t be a big loss…

(Nowadays I don’t even really use recipes but sometimes I still feel the pull… I usually make my own recipes from scratch though as that is waaaaaay easier. Keto recipes are full with stuff I wouldn’t use anyway… Not like I have problem to left out half of the ingredients and stuff but I needed my several years of frequent experimenting to be able to do it. And there is a risk it won’t be great just edible…)

If you don’t like very spicy things, use spices carefully. And if the food is good otherwise, next time just lower the spice amount? Taste while cooking…

How come you don’t have enough meat? Don’t do recipes you don’t have the ingredients for unless you know what you are doing. Or make only half.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #4

If there’s a recipe you’d like to try, go through it and make sure you have all the ingredients. Then buy whatever you lack when you go out shopping. This takes planning ahead, however.

A simple meal would involve chops or a roast, plus a boiled or steamed vegetable. You could add a salad to that. None of these requires a certain amount of anything, just enough to feed the people who will be eating the meal. However, if you planned to add gravy for the meat and cheese sauce for the vegetable, then you’d need to check on your ingredients early enough to be able to go out shopping and still have time to cook.

When you gain enough experience, you will learn how spices interact, what the standard substitutions are, and so forth, and you will be better at adjusting recipes to suit the circumstances. If your local school system has an adult-education programme, I’d be willing to bet that they teach a cooking class you could take.

#5

There’s a ton of them, but you can use a recipe calculator to scale a recipe correctly to any size, larger or smaller than the original. Small ones are easy enough to do yourself, but when there’s a ton of ingredients, it helps keep everything at the right ratio.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #6

Not to mention that when reducing by more than a half or increasing beyond double, certain ingredients will need to be adjusted for the recipe to continue tasting right.